Elementary? No  but fast!

Oak Ridge computer is world's fastest

The backside of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory super computer named Titan is shown on Monday, November 12, 2012 after it was named the worldÄôs fastest computer. (Chad Greene/Special to the News Sentinel)

2010, 2012

The inside of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory super computer named Titan is shown on Monday, November 12, 2012 after it was named the worldÄôs fastest computer. (Chad Greene/Special to the News Sentinel)

2012

Aaron Stephan, an engineering technician works on computer parts for the Oak Ridge National LaboratoryÄôs super computer named Titan on Monday, November 12, 2012 after it was named the worldÄôs fastest computer. (Chad Greene/Special to the News Sentinel)

2012

Thom Mason, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director is shown on Monday, November 12, 2012 after their new super computer named Titan was named the worldÄôs fastest computer. (Chad Greene/Special to the News Sentinel)

2010, 2012

The inside of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory super computer named Titan is shown on Monday, November 12, 2012 after it was named the worldÄôs fastest computer. (Chad Greene/Special to the News Sentinel)

2012

Chad Greene/Special to Scripps Newspapers Thom Mason of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory shows off Titan, the lab's Cray XK7 supercomputer, on Monday after it was named the world's fastest computer.

2012

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory super computer named Titan is shown on Monday, November 12, 2012 after it was named the worldÄôs fastest computer. (Chad Greene/Special to the News Sentinel)

2012

Jack Breazeale, a computer technician, monitors the Oak Ridge National LaboratoryÄôs super computer named Titan on Monday, November 12, 2012 after it was named the worldÄôs fastest computer. (Chad Greene/Special to the News Sentinel)

2012

OAK RIDGE, Tenn — It is Titan's time at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the results could be breathtaking.

Titan is ORNL's new Cray XK7 supercomputer, a transformed version of the Jaguar machine, with a hybrid architecture and at least 10 times the number-crunching power of its Oak Ridge predecessor.

Titan earned its laurel after tests proved the machine was capable of a sustained performance of 17.5 petaflops — or 17.5 million billion mathematical calculations per second. The supercomputer reportedly has a peak capability of 27 petaflops. A single petaflop is a 1 followed by 15 zeroes.

The TOP500 List of the world's fastest computers was released Monday, and Titan stands atop it. Titan supplanted Sequoia — an IBM Blue Gene/Q system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Sequoia is now the second-fastest supercomputer with a sustained capability of 16.3 petaflops, followed by the K computer, a Fujitsu system in Japan; Mira, an IBM system at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois; and JUQUEEN, an upgraded IBM system in Germany that's now the fastest machine in Europe.

Another U.S. machine to emerge on the list was Stampede, a Dell supercomputer at the University of Texas. It was ranked No. 7.

"It's terrific," ORNL Director Thom Mason said Monday as the Oak Ridge lab hosted the news media for a tour and briefing about Titan and performance computing.

Sequoia, an IBM system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, was tops on the previous list released in June. There are other high-end supercomputers in development around the globe.

A dozen or more Cray technicians have been in Oak Ridge recently to help with the startup of Titan, which was assembled in the 200 cabinets previously occupied by Jaguar — another Cray system that was once the world's fastest machine.

There has been tremendous interest in Titan in high-performance computing circles because of its use of graphics processing units, which grew out of advanced technologies developed for video games, to greatly accelerate the computing power.

Among the futuristic combination of central and graphics processing units in Titan's brain are NVIDIA's latest Tesla GPUs.

The 18,688 NVIDIA GPUs will be paired with an equal number of 16-core AMD Opteron CPUs, combining to create far greater capabilities within the same footprint as Jaguar and, according to ORNL, requiring only slightly more electricity.

"Because they handle hundreds of calculations simultaneously, GPUs can go through many more CPUs in a given time," ORNL said in a statement. "By relying on its 299,008 CPU cores to guide simulations and allowing its new NVIDIA GPUs to do the heavy lifting, Titan will enable researchers to run scientific calculations with greater speed and accuracy."

The lab said Titan will be used for research on energy sources, climate change, efficient engines, materials and other scientific challenges.

Jeff Nichols, the lab's scientific computing chief, said the new system will cost about $100 million, but he noted that the lab saved about $20 million by reusing the Jaguar cabinets (with new Titan artwork on the front ones) and maintaining the same power, cooling and support systems.

ORNL is the U.S. Department of Energy's largest science lab and hosts the agency's Leadership Computing Facility. The laboratory owes a bit of the credit for the ranking to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Oak Ridge has hosted NOAA's top supercomputer — Gaia, a Cray machine dedicated exclusively to climate research — for a couple of years as part of a memorandum of understanding to share research and operations.

When planning the construction of Titan, ORNL did not have a sufficient amount of money from the Energy department to fully populate the new supercomputer with NVIDIA GPUs. In order to get the entire complement of 18,688 graphics processing units, NOAA agreed to supplement the lab's funding in exchange for a certain amount of research time on the new super-duper Titan.

This is at least the fourth time in history that ORNL has had the world's fastest computer on its campus. Besides Titan and Jaguar, the others were the Intel Paragon (1995) and ORACLE (1953).

Mason said the lab expects Titan to follow in the tradition of Jaguar and be a super-productive machine for modeling and simulations needed for scientific discovery.

There's even more to come from Titan, Nichols said. He confirmed that Titan performed the benchmark tests for the rankings with some parts of the system not yet fully operable.

"So, we have room for future performance increases," Nichols said by email from Salt Lake City, Utah, where he's attending the Supercomputing Conference this week.